Thailand's spending on public cloud services is expected to surge 31.7% year-on-year to 26.8 billion baht in 2021, in tandem with strong growth seen worldwide due to the pandemic, says global tech research firm Gartner.
The company indicated that spending in Thailand could grow 28.2% to 34.4 billion baht in 2022. Last year, 20.3 billion baht was spent on public cloud services.
At the global level, spending is forecast to rise 23.1% year-on-year to $332.3 billion in 2021, up from $270 billion in 2020 and it is expected to hit $397.4 billion next year.
The pandemic has stimulated chief information officers (CIOs) to move mission critical workloads from on-site to the cloud, said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.
"Emerging technologies such as containerisation, virtualisation and edge computing are becoming more mainstream and driving cloud spending," Mr Nag said. "Simply put, the pandemic served as a multiplier for CIOs' interest in the cloud."
Despite economic challenges, offerings that support public cloud services are showing strong growth, he said.
Software as a service (SaaS) remains the biggest segment in the cloud service globally and is forecast to reach $122.6 billion in 2021, up from $102.7 billion last year, as demand for composable applications require a different type of SaaS experience, he said.
Meanwhile, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) are expected to see the highest growth this year since CIOs need to scale infrastructure that supports moving complex workloads to the cloud and people working remotely.
IaaS is projected to grow 38.5% year-on-year to $82 billion and DaaS is expected to surge 67.7% to $2 billion this year.
"It's important to note that usage and adoption of cloud that served enterprises well during the ongoing crisis will not look the same in the coming years," said Mr Nag.
"It will further evolve from serving pedestrian use cases such as infrastructure and application migration to those that combines cloud with technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, 5G and more."
He said cloud in the future will also draw on various new technologies needed by CIOs for the development of business use cases.
